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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28546821">Shell Game</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias'>Alias (anafabula)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Magnus Archives (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>(but not graphic gun violence), (for lack of a better way to phrase that? Daisy thinking about her old job.), Banned Together Bingo 2020, Character Study, Character with symptoms of depression, Content Warning for Guns, Hunt Daisy Tonner, Implied/Referenced Canon-Typical Police Violence, Introspection, Maybe PTSD?, Other, Post-Episode: e132 Entombed (The Magnus Archives), Section 31 (The Magnus Archives), The Magnus Intermission, This one’s sad folks, Trauma, canon compliant eating disorder, it’s just post-coffin Daisy thinking about pre-coffin Daisy and being sad!, less recovery more treading water, season 4, that’s literally it! that’s the fic, why do my tags always look so extreme spelled out!!</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 23:29:27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>834</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28546821</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Daisy still misses her gun.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Jonathan “Jon” Sims | The Archivist &amp; Alice “Daisy” Tonner, The Hunt &amp; Alice “Daisy” Tonner</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Banned Together Bingo 2020, The Magnus Intermission: A Weekly Hiatus Prompt Fest</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Shell Game</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written as a belated “<i>What have I become?</i>” hiatus fill, and, like all of my 2020(ish) fic, goes on a BTB card, as— frankly, I think I might be cursed in the “<code>Firearms</code>” department as far as keeping things (P)G goes. I swear I’m trying my damndest on that front! We’ll all see if there’s such a thing as G-rated Daisy introspection, I guess?</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Daisy doesn’t want to be the kind of person who misses having a gun.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Half the time when she looks at Jon – still – which she does much more often, these days, even though he looks back – half the time, when she looks at Jon, her eyes still go straight to his neck: to the scar she left there, thin and pale from a relative perspective but raised and ropy in a way she wouldn’t have expected. She thought she’d barely nicked him. He just scars so easily.</p><p>She looks at his throat when he swallows, and she thinks about how obviously he flinched at gunshots. It’s not surprising, she tells herself, sometimes, trying to be stern, that’s the <em>normal</em> thing to do, that’s the <em>human</em> thing to do. It’s a loud threatening noise that people don’t encounter in their daily lives, not for the most part, not if they’re people. He’s almost got one up on her there, really. But she thinks of that, of the way he moves in general, of the scar that shows above all his collared shirts, and her mind still turns to how recently that would have sung <em>prey</em>.</p><p>What gets her – gets her more and more as possibly the most informed observer in the building, no less – is how deceptive that is. How occasionally he moves in ways that make it obvious, instead, even when he’s awake, the predatory grace she knows from mirrors just slightly off-kilter. Like those animals with deceptive coloring, or – she doesn’t know enough to make the analogy, just to be sure that what works here must work for more straightforward animals as well.</p><p>Sometimes she remembers wanting to hurt him, still. She’s pretty sure it’s remembering, not wanting, at this point. She thinks about what he is in order to get herself to knock that off: that would be playing into his hands. Wanting to protect him, or to just let him be, that’s the real subversion.</p><p>Daisy can tell, because she knows how much her past self would’ve been put off to know this now, and because it makes a rubbish sort of story.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>She was good at telling one specific, necessary story. That’s all she needed, really. Not like anyone was really trying to question her. All she'd ever needed to hit the threshold of was an excuse.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>She’d thought of it as a lesser evil, when she was still on the force. It seemed logical enough, at the time, given what passed for logic for her then – if everything in her was howling, more and more and easier to indulge every day, for teeth and claws and blood, for violence at her own <em>hands</em>, keeping (food?) suspects outside arm’s reach was a mercy, was the control keeping her human. The amount of manual dexterity alone just to scare people from a distance, with good enough aim to sometimes need damage control: yes. Surely that was what she needed to show for herself, to show she was still on the right side of the line. Fingers and thumbs and not getting her hands dirty, mouth firmly closed.</p><p>And she reminds herself: that was still wrong. Proper wrong, not wrong like the way she feels about her scar while knowing that people wouldn’t want her to but the kind of wrong that makes her mind light up and her eyes sharp, the kind she barely needed to rationalize by the end. The kind that made Basira tell her that she’d gone too far, sometimes, even if she still came along after saying so.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Maybe Basira would remember she can be useful if she could shoot things.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Maybe she’s not useful if she can’t shoot things. She certainly doesn’t feel useful; she doesn’t feel like a threat.</p><p>Or— that’s not right. She doesn’t feel like a threat in any way that she would <em>want</em> to feel like a threat. She wants – she doesn’t know what she wants. That’s the problem. If she could imagine what power looked like that was hers instead of that was <em>her</em>, if she could remember how bad of idea it is all the time instead of in fits and starts. It feels like cheating to zone out but she does that plenty, too. If she spends an hour in a room with a vulnerable human heartbeat and doesn’t really notice, that’s kind of success, actually, she tells herself. Succeeding enough she doesn’t register the effort. That’s the idea.</p><p>It’s not quite hunger for her, but restlessness. She wishes she had something to do with her hands. She wishes she could trust herself to judge that it would be helpful, that it would be progress, when she found something to do with her hands.</p><p>She looked around Elias’s old office, before. When she found the contract. Did that, and then caught herself, and signed before she indulged the idea that he’d have left a literal murder weapon out where she could want it any further.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Daisy misses her gun.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I’m sad. Hope you are (enjoyably) too, or otherwise having whatever would be personally in-character emotions on your own time. Tell me about them?</p></blockquote></div></div>
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